Poetry

Devotion: The Burnt-Over District

by Bruce Smith

Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls,

churched

river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities

and principalities

of central New York, the hollows and corners of the

burnt-over districts

visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings,

gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling

with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb,

the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through

the underbrush

to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day.

We learned obedience

and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic

eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve.

He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to

block for punts—

and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited

for the cops

and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance

one does

in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified,

and swore

and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead,

and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he

was befuddled

with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid

in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl

and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes

of his eyes.

The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the

indwelling beauty

of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq

with three others

in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot.

I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat

until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall

in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing,

he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.